I believe I am on the brink of learning new insights. I have feared writing about them would limit the insight from coming to me. I know that I will have my AHA moment and then will need to share. But I also feel a need to put out there that this is what is going on with me.
I watch my father navigate his acceptance that my mother, his wife, is now in a nursing home and that she will never be the person she was. There are many ways in which this might be considered good. She was a harsh woman her whole life. Her dementia only aggravates this personality characteristic. My father has always been faithful to his vows to her, tho she was not to him.
I watch my father keep his commitment to care for her in sickness and in health and in the beginning of this journey I thought it was firm commitment to always standing by his word that kept him with her. Lord knows I tried to get him to divorce her since I was 14 and he would not. I watched his lonliness and sadness my whole life as these two people who were not meant to stay together did so.
Now as she travels through time in her head I watch him travel with her. There were good times, even though I never saw them. And they are reliving them together. And I am a voyeur. I have seen them kiss for the first time ever. I have heard them say I love you for the first time ever. And I have heard my father whisper to her "come back to me" with a pain you can only know if you have lost someone you love dearly.
He stayed with her because he loves her. I have never known that. I have no idea where this will take me but I know when my AHA comes I will be better for having experienced it.
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Oh my gosh, what emotions this must stir for you! Seeing this love you've never seen, and at this stage. I hope it is a healing experience for you.
ReplyDeleteMy parents had a very similar relationship. That's why it was very difficult for me to watch my dad grieve my mother's death. I just had a hard time "believing" it.
I will be thinking of you!
Oh, god, this is why we are all linked - - all of our parents had the same stuff going on!!
ReplyDeleteCath - wow!! wow!!
I mean, wow!!
Your AHA moment is going to come when you feel, really feel, the insight that she loved him too.
I think in some mysterious way, mom being in the nursing home is good for both of them because it is allowing them to remember that they love each other before one of them passes on.
This is their love story, darlin'! Lord, we've been waiting a loooong time for this one!